Happy Halloween! It has been quite some time since I wrote about the progress of Pendulum Ascension due to my recent trip to GDC Online Down in Austin, Texas. Since then my team and I have made great strides in developing our game. The art team produced several art assets with more currently in progress, all the while a few members adapt from traditional art to digital. The programmers implemented a number of mechanics into the game including the first puzzle, specifically the combination-lock for the display case containing the pocket watch. As of today, the narrative group hammered out story elements which solidified the connection between what the player does and the overarching plot. In the case of art assets, I created a word document and a story for every member of the team to contribute to two lists, the first containing art assets necessary for our game, and the second for optional/aesthetic assets. With this, we are able to prioritize what the art team needs to develop and begin working. From that list, I have created a few assets including an ornate style door of a mansion, matching walls, and the pocket watch. During this development we ran into an issue with our engine, Flashpunk, in which it does not handle vector art efficiently. Rather than change engines, which might not had even solved the issue or introducing new problems, we made the decision to change to raster art. From this change, we need to be more aware of the dimensions of our assets as we lose vector art's ability to scale. In the case of programming, I don't have much to say aside from an issue they brought during the last team meeting. They feel the narrative team has not communicated with them clearly, specifically on the creation of puzzles. As a solution to this, Tyler and I are discussing schedule changes in order to get people from both programming and narrative to have some work blocks together, and have already made one change. In the case of narrative, some members of the team felt the narrative was disconnected or underdeveloped. It wasn't clear what importance the murders had or how they connected with the plot other than having a member of the Usher family involved. Without diving too far into spoilers, we made a connection between the Usher bloodline and our main character Martin Levine, and the various murders involving a pendulum type theme (think about what a pendulum does), and gave our antagonist a motive for his actions. As this subject was discussed earlier today, I can't give much more detail as it is still a work in progress and is subject to change after the other team members have a chance to hear; however I believe we now have a solid foundation and hopefully will be able to present more soon.

As a result of attending GDC Online 2012, as well as generally having a busy week, I was unable to post an update to the blog on October 10th. To start off with, I began working weekends back home on an every two weeks schedule as my financial situation is looking grim and I need to make money in order to buy necessities such as food. After the weekend I had to pack and catch a lengthy flight to Austin, Texas and didn't arrive until nine o'clock Monday night. The Narrative Summit at GDC began Tuesday and a number of events filled the whole day, though I will only elaborate on the most interesting. The first panel I attended was "Writing the Romance-able NPC: ICING the Content Cake" with speaker Heidi McDonald from Schell Games. The session raised my curiosity as I haven't seen a game that I feel effectively implements a romance system. I was a little disappointed the panel didn't discuss the implementation; however, I still found the talk interesting. She explained that one importance of romance in games is that it fills at least four of Maslow's hierarchy of needs with a potential of safety as the fifth, if the game offers the need to protect the romance-able npcs. She also listed in a ven diagram traits that over five hundred players in a survey determined were attractive or unattractive in npcs; childish and helpless being two of the most undesirable traits. Clara Fernandez Vara from MIT hosted another session entitled "Environmental Storytelling: Indices and the Art of Leaving Traces". Of all the sessions I attended, this one in particular proved to be the most beneficial to Pendulum Ascension. She explained the three types as defined by Charles Peirce the first being an icon which conveys an idea by resembling it (photo), the second being a symbol in which the object and meaning are arbitrary (bio-hazard symbol or languages), and finally an index which is physically connected to the idea (where there's smoke there's fire). The session focused on the third sign, Indices, which leave traces or pieces for the player to create their own story. I'll leave the discussion of this talk to a later time as there are plans to have Clara skype in and discuss the use of indices. The rest of Tuesday I attend a few other panels and the expo floor, though the night was filled with networking events. Right after the sessions ended for the day, I headed over to the Amazon.com party at the luxurious Four Seasons Hotel. The Amazon networking event was by far the classiest and lavish party I have ever attended. They offered open bar and food including caviar, artisan pizza, and delicious oriental food. There were few tables around, which greatly encouraged socializing with people as you needed a place to set your drink. I managed to engage in several conversations this way, which was far easier than other networking parties. After that I went to the GDC opening party with a fellow classmate, though I left early as the party was too loud, dark and crowded to socialize with anyone. My night ended at a place called the Gingerman in which most of the narrative summit people met. There I met Dave Mark, who spoke half of my favorite session at GDC in San Fransisco, and engaged in a very enjoyable discussion.

This week I began working on creating filler art assets with Tyler for our programmers to implement into the white box of our level for testing purposes. I performed an image search online for some references of a mansion foyer and focused on one that consisted of wooden panel walls and arches. I designed a door based on these reference images that could potentially modify it to utilize it as the walls. After completing the door, I felt that it was far too small and did not have enough pixels to design it well and scraped the image. Working with higher resolution I redesigned the door, adding overlay effects to create texture on the door as well as using a custom brushes to add a unique engraving. These initial art assets were intend only as filler art and, I hate to admit, regardless of that, Tyler and myself became a little too involved in designing these assets and were not able to finish this particular story. Aside from that the team spent remainder of the week preparing for our first iteration demo for the other game design students on campus. Maria built the presentation in prezi and did an amazing job on that, in which we all contributed pieces. With the prezi presentation completed we spent the next meeting practicing the demo making changes and giving each other advice on how to improve. Today, after letting the other team go first as to allow a late member to arrive, we presented our iteration at noon and it went better than our practice runs. As for problems we've encountered this week, there were a few minor and one major issue the team faced. The first minor issue was that only a few members have been using svn to save their work, which causes problems for team members as they don't have access to it. The other issue was that the team was becoming too specialized in areas such as programming or narrative meaning that if one member was gone, others would not be able to continue on that area. . I talked with a few of the members today, and will be putting up stories on trello to help resolve the issue. The major issue was the attendance of one particular member and its getting out of our control. We asked for the professors for advice and possible intervention.